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“How about, keeping him alive?” she says, eyeing up Drake.

“Oh. That little inconvenience.” He blinks at Drake. But then his features relax. “We’ll be fine, won’t we, Drake? Bygones can be bygones. Since your life is now completely dependent on my actions.”

“Is it?” Drake asks, a little coolly. “From where I’m standing, it looks rather like yours is dependent on mine.”

Cosmer takes a step forwards. “You’ll follow my instructions, or I’ll make you follow them.”

Drake smiles. “Please,” he says. “Tell me how you would plan to do just that. I doubt signing out a weapon just to threaten me with it would constitute Approved Use. Or perhaps you will deny me your ship’s entirely unappetising and non-nutritious food.” His smile deepens. “Yet there must be other places to get it, seeing as you haven’t perished from hunger yourself.”

For a second, we’re all still.

It’s as if Riss and I aren’t even here. Cosmer is glaring at Drake with a hatred I’ve never known him to have for anyone else before. Drake looks more amused than angry, but somehow I sense something harder, rockier, in his eyes.

Cosmer’s edged reply finally comes. “I’ll tell you why you’re going to follow my instructions.” He nods in my direction. “If you and I fail, it’s highly likely she will, too.”

Seemingly at the same time, they both look at me. I instantly prickle from the attention.

Drake turns away first. “Not much of a threat. I hardly know her.”

I feel my face go slack.

He’s not supposed to say that. We said we were friends.

But maybe he’s just trying to rebuff Cosmer’s threat – more of this inexplicable mental game they seem to be embroiled in.

“You seemed pretty comfortable with each other when I arrived yesterday,” Cosmer says.

That’s enough, I decide.

Barely looking at them, I say, “Stop it. I know this is far from an ideal situation, and seems impossible right now. But unless there are any loopholes that we don’t know about for avoiding Integration—” I glance at Riss, who shakes her head in answer to the question. “Then we just have to go along with this. For now.”

Riss chimes in, her tone prickly. “Absolutely. So, no more fucking about. I haven’t once failed a mission, and I’m not going to start now, because you two couldn’t stop measuring yourselves.”

It strikes me as an odd thing to say – but it does have the effect of shutting them both up. They actually – or Cosmer, at least – look a little outraged.

Then, she takes my arm, steering me fast towards the grate.

There, she uses one of two keys hanging from a long cord around her neck that had been tucked under her shirt. Cosmer has a key on his neck too – he’d used it to lock his ship once we’d all got out of it.

I turn back. Cosmer and Drake haven’t moved yet. I suppose they’re waiting until Riss and I are safely inside.

How gentlemanly.

I nod stiltedly in their direction, as if to say goodbye.

But I’m not sure to whom.

“What do their measurements have to do with anything?” I whisper to her. “They seem the same height to me.” I contemplate it. “Drake is maybe a little taller.”

That makes her snort with heavy, nasally laughter.

“You’re rather sweet, really, aren’t you?”

Last night, she’d thought she was the idiot in the room.

I guess that honour is actually mine.

Inside the room, about twenty people at one-man desks are tapping away on typewriters or scribbling on paper, steel-nibbed pens flying off the pages. They’re all wearing leather headbands that cover their ears, like the one Dezeeves wore in Cosmer’s ship. Each band is connected by a tube to an enormous long-range radio at the far side of the room. It’s the kind of large, free-standing radio with half a dozen long antennas I call pipe organs, because that’s what they remind me of.